Invisible threads are the strongest ties

Category: Scarface Chronicles

I know that I am 11 days too late. But I just couldn’t help it ( I was battling the never ending platoon of my arch rival – (yeah you guessed it right) EXAMS!). 😛 But still here it is. The second installment of the Scarface Chronicles. 🙂

Scarface smashed open the door. What he saw simply bewildered him. He was literally seeing the gate of hell. Death was beckoning him to enter it…

For what seemed like a jiffy, there was a huge jolt of blinding white light. Scarface felt so peaceful, yet extremely frightened. And for the next few moments all he could remember was this…

It was a bright sunshine. The flowers waved. The leaves rustled. The city was abuzz. The market was coming alive. A young, handsome boy walked through the streets. He was lean and tall but had broad shoulders. The blonde hair glimmered while it waved with the wind. Robert was new to the Denarius. Every nook and cranny brought surprises to the boy who lived in Minor Cities. This was his dream. His dream of serving the nation and leading it to progress. His work on the newly found element, Presto which was touted to be the fuel of future, had caught the eyes of Quaesitor Ludwin and that’s how he came to Denarius.

Robert had just passed out of the university and he wanted to gain the apprenticeship of one of the quaesitors. He went to Catunya where Presto was first found. He researched it and studied its properties for his thesis. That was when he came across its extraordinary property. It not only gave massive power which was hundred thousand times more powerful than its nearest rival when its nucleus was split but also left no forms of radiation. He immediately published this exciting discovery in various science magazines which created a flurry in the scientific world. Lot of quaesitors offered him their apprenticeship but Quaesitor Ludwin’s was the most exciting of all. Ludwin was highly esteemed for his ground-breaking work on elements and was deemed to be a man who stood by his moral principles in a world where every researcher was stooping to no end in order to win fame and money.

As he was walking a passer-by brushed by him and immediately apologized. Robert gave a nod and went to sit on a bench. He wanted to soak in the city’s energetic atmosphere. BOOM! The ground and the bench started shaking violently. Building began to crack and people ran helter-skelter. Women cried while men were pulverized, not knowing what to do. This was the first earthquake in centuries people ever experienced. The technology had become so advanced that it could stop earthquakes and volcanoes. So it was no surprise people were panicked and ran to the nearest building. But was it really an earthquake? Because earthquakes never seemed to have resulted in explosions and fire. It meant only one thing, the WAR had begun.

Robert immediately ran towards the Peniplane campus in the easterly direction. As he reached there, panting, he saw that the glass dome of the main building had collapsed. All of sudden he remembered his mother and wife were to arrive by the hyperloop in the next hour. He grabbed his AirBike which levitated above the ground while it moved and sped off towards the hyperloop terminal. As he arrived there the terminal was in ruins. He followed the line and sure there was wreckage. He could see it teeming with medical teams and sirens wailing. He prayed his mother and his wife were alright. He didn’t find them among the injured. He went to the makeshift tents which were pitched nearby because the hospital in the city had collapsed.

There he found his mother dead and his wife battling for survival. The doctor had told him that it would be hard for his wife to live. Yet he stayed by her side for the next few hours never taking his eyes of her. “Finally, the enemy missile bombings had started!” thought Robert.

In the night another set of bombings occurred, even worse than the previous one. The tent collapsed and a shard pierced his eye. A pole supporting the tent landed on him. He shouted his wife’s name. And then he lost all his senses.

Two days later

He got up and looked around. He was seated on a couch in a lobby and was in a totally different place. It seemed to be a luxurious place for there was a carpet running beneath the couch and chandeliers were hanging from the ceiling but it was very crowded. People were leaning against the wall. Most of them seemed to be anxious. Across the lobby there was a mirror. He looked at it. Instead of his left eye a huge scar was there. Scarface…

~ Yash Kumar

So, if you like the story and want to write the third part of this series, send in your entries at saksham0311@gmail.com, before Sunday, June 1st. Now don’t just loll around! Pick up your Parkers and pen down the story! 🙂

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Scarface walked down the deserted street, clutching a bijou object close to his body. The street led to a hayloft which had been abandoned for the past seven years. Now a foxtail pine had grown in the middle of that hayloft. It had broken the roof but the construction was still enough to provide protection and shelter. But all in all it was nothing more than a piece of junk.

Scarface trod, taking extra-long strides, towards that junk. He wore a long dark overcoat, which ran even below his knees, looking much like a cloak. He had covered his head with a hood to avoid eyeballs. The sky was covered with dark gloomy clouds, having no silver lining. All around him was destruction. Buildings were falling down just as the scurf off a wall. People were dying in scores every day. They had no place to live and nowhere to go. All hell had broken loose in the town. There was no electricity, no water, and no food. The society had incurred radical changes. The market had crashed. The economy had found new depths and inhumanism had reached its water mark. There was no one to live for…and no one to live by…

As he walked by, Scarface saw a hapless woman crying in a corner of the street. She looked so frail that even a touch could shatter her into pieces. Scarface stopped, looked into her eye and then started to advance. “She is not worth saving” he said to himself. “All this would soon come to an end”, thought he with a deep sigh. He felt as helpless as the woman.

“Robert Hill”, he whispered to himself. He thought that before becoming Scarface, he lived the life of a man known as Robert Hill. Robert had been a prodigy. He was the apple of everyone’s eye. Hill had achieved exemplary feat in science and math. He was one of the youngest and brightest scientists of the ‘Golden Era’, but the Depletion had changed it all…

He bent down and picked up a torn poster of a young intrepid soldier, who had lost his life in the battle. A glance at the poster transported Robert into the halcyon days of the ‘Golden Era’. When there was no war, no threat of the apocalypse, when the light of the sun could bring warmth to one’s soul, when a drop of water from the heaven could pierce through the body and find its way to the heart…

But those days were long gone and the human race was on the verge of extinction now. People were dying every minute. Even Robert had watched his mother and wife die, helplessly. He had felt their pain and agony when they took their last breaths in his arm. And now he was desolate. Forlorn. Afraid to talk to anyone. Afraid to meet eyes with anyone.

There was a time when he feared death. Every second he lived, he thought, brought him closer to his death. This notion scared him to his bones. Terrified him. But now he was not frightened of death. As a matter of fact, he welcomed death. He wanted to meet death itself. Shake hands with him. He wanted to harness its power. He wanted death upon the world. He wanted to destroy the earth…

Such a preposterous idea had crept into his mind insidiously. It had bred upon his desolation. He wanted to end the cruelty in the world once and for all. And that was the reason why he stole that piece of Presto from the museum. Now all he needed was to find a way to exploit the power of that substance and to use it to dismantle the foundations of mankind. He had this invidious plan which would satisfy his personal vendetta. And he was ready to do anything for it.

When he reached the hayloft, he dispelled the idea for a while and thought how narrowly he had managed to steal that piece of Presto. But just as he opened the door of the old building; he heard gunshots from inside…

Scarface smashed open the door. What he saw simply bewildered him. He was literally seeing the gate of hell. Death was beckoning him to enter it…

Ok. So here’s the thing. This is the first of a four part series titled ‘Scarface’. I have written the first part, but the next three parts will be written by you! All you need to do is think of a good sequel to this piece of writing and email it to me by Sunday, May 11th. So Scarface is your character now. You can either make him the protagonist or the antagonist to take the story forward. Well, now go on… what are you waiting for? This is your story now!